How we produce and consume food has a bigger
impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity. The food
industry is the largest sector of our economy; food touches everything
from our health to the environment, climate change, economic inequality
and the federal budget. Yet we have no food policy — no plan or
agreed-upon principles — for managing American agriculture or the food
system as a whole.

It's (of course) nonsense to claim that "we" have "no food policy".
We have, in fact, a vast
collection of laws, regulations, subsidies, prohibitions, programs,
mandates,
nudges, and nags all designed to affect what gets produced
and eaten. What the authors really mean is: they don't like
this current policy.

But it's not hard to see
where these earnest statist nannies are going:

This must change.

(Picture four fists hitting the table to punctuate
this totalitarian demand.)

Bittman and his co-authors prattle (on and on)
about the current "food system" but the "system"
of letting people freely decide what to consume
on their own and letting the marketplace provide
it is never really considered. Quoting myself
from a few years ago:

The whole notion of food being a "system" that can be "fixed" is
another instance of what Thomas Sowell called the "unconstrained
vision": the unexamined, unshakeable belief that it's
all one big well-understood machine, and to get the outcomes we
prefer, all we have to do is "fix" it. And there's the obvious
corollary: anyone who disagrees is either evil or foolish, and can
be safely ignored, or made ineffective "by any
means necessary".

And (indeed) the four authors assure us:

Only those with a vested interest in the status quo would argue against
creating public policies with these goals.

Any opposition is illegitimate.

Which naturally brings us to "Liberal Bullshit"
from the perceptive writer William Voegeli (excerpted
from
his
new book). See how this relates to the
"policy prescription" set forth by the aforementioned nannies:

A bullshit prescription, by the same token, might actually work to
some degree, but any such efficacy is inadvertent and tangential to the
central purpose: demonstrating the depths of the prescriber’s concern
for the problem and those who suffer from it, concerns impelling the
determination to “do something” about it. As the political project that
exists to vindicate the axiom that all sorts of government program X’s
can solve an endless list of social problem Y’s, liberalism is always at
risk of descending into prescriptive bullshit. Liberal compassion lends
itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy
to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and
exhibitionism. I, the empathizer, am interested in the sufferer for love
of myself, Rousseau contended. Accordingly, an ineffectual program may
serve the compassionate purposes of its designers and defenders as
well as or better than a successful one.

Vogeli's book is going on my read-someday list.

The
Fire tells the story of a recent panel at Smith College, where
Wendy Kaminer used words that made the ladies shriek and stand on their
chairs. Well, figuratively. There was the n-word, for example, but
that's
not all.
The student newspaper published a bowdlerized transcript
of the discussion, including the following from Ms Kaminer (WK):

WK: And by, “the c-word,” you mean the word [c-word]?

The paper also couldn't
resist expurgating
a word used by Smith President Kathleen McCartney:

Kathleen McCartney: … We’re just wild and [ableist slur], aren’t we?

The [ableist slur]? It was "crazy". As in "You don't have to be
[ableist slur] to send your daughter to Smith, but it helps."

Read David
Weigel on the "nobody" Rich Weinstein, who's made it a sideline
to discover the "speak-o"s and "off the cuff" remarks of Obamacare
architect Jonathan Gruber that revealed how intentionally
dishonest and opaque the process of crafting the legislation was.

This is kind of priceless:

“The next day, I woke up and turned on my iPad,” Weinstein recalls.
“I did a quick search. You know, 'Gee, if I wonder if anything is out
there about this Jonathan Gruber guy?' And the first result was about
this video. 'Holy crap, what is going on?' Excuse my language. It just
kept getting bigger and bigger. Later that day, a friend told me
that Rush Limbaugh was talking about this video. I’m at WaWa, and I'm
eating a sandwich in the car, and Limbaugh comes back from commercial
and says 'There's more on this Gruber video. The White House is
responding.' I’m like, 'What do you mean, the White House is
responding?'”

If our mainstream news organizations weren't such mindless shills
for the left, uncovering this story would have been their job.
But in this world, it's left up to folks like Weinstein.

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